About Lauren Semivan

Detroit-based photographer Lauren Semivan creates staged photographs that use objects, drawings, and the human presence to call to mind psychological states and suspended time. These controlled, black-and-white images include mysterious arrangements of string, bones, and branches, lit so that they appear like abstractions—string taking on the appearance of graphite line and fabric resembling transparent washes of paint. Interested in the experimentation inherent to both science and art, Semivan works and reworks her images, leaving a narrative of ghostly traces behind as evidence of her process. To create the images, she uses an early-20th-century 8-by-10-inch view camera, which adds to the dreamlike nature of the worlds that she creates, before scanning and printing negatives with no digital manipulation.